"Any kind of popular trend is infinitely more wholesome than listening to old records. It's more important that people know that some kind of pleasure can be derived from things that are around them - rather than to catalogue more stuff - you can do that forever"- HARRY SMITH
........................"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may / Old Time is still a-flying / And this same flower that smiles today/Tomorrow will be dying"-ROBERT HERRICK

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

uncanny persistence of the H - part 32 - Kate Carr

#32 - Kate Carr

press release:

Kate
Carr
It Was A Time Of Laboured Metaphores
The Helen Scarsdale Agency // HMS 035
release date : 2/26/2015

The field recordist and lucid-dream composer Kate Carr conjures a liminal art,
seeking to articulate the remembrances, the concrete fact, and the
deliberate exaggerations of detail, all in the pursuit of addressing
the human interaction with the environment. Psychology, history, politics,
geography, storytelling, fantasy, the notion of the self, and the disintegration
of these rigors at their transect all come into play in her ongoing work. She
has set herself on path to make these investigations, relocating herself
from her native Australia to Northern Ireland, followed by innumerable
detours. Hence, It Was A Time Of Labored Metaphors.

This album from Carr intertwines the lugubrious wash of environmental detail
with the dissolved songwriting described in the distant past as 'rural
psychedelia' rendering an aesthetic in the orbit of :zoviet*france: or as the dub of
a dub of a dub abstractions from Dome. For example, a guitar swollen with
ethereal blight cycles in soft whirlpools of drone and thrum as the gloom
of an irish rainstorm pours down a sewer drain. Electricity proves a nobel tool
as well, as she tapes into telephone wires to extract deadtones of
unanswered calls. It is as if Carr is peeling back the layers of history
to uncover the ghostly stains of human existence at a particular place. The
dead may not be talking but the soil and its occupiers still do.

"This
album comes out of a series of travels and artist residencies I did over 2014
and 2015 not long after I had moved from Australia to Belfast in Northern
Ireland. It was a time of great instability and unease, with a precarious new
home, which I had trouble making much sense of, and a great deal of travel for
my artistic work on trips across many parts of Europe, also to South Africa,
and back and forth to Australia. And this experience of living many places, and
nowhere, of constantly meeting phalanxes of new people, of stumbling and
drifting, connecting and disconnecting, arriving and departing was one I found
incredibly disorienting and powerful. I had a constant feeling of unease, of
not belonging, and I found this infused both the physical and emotional
landscape of these experiences in ways which seemed both astonishingly vivid in
the moment, but somehow untrustworthy. My relationships with people, with
places, with landscapes were either far too much or too little, by turns
profound and mundane, life changing and pointless. I was so radically unmoored
I began searching outside of myself for signs or some sort of solidity which
might help to make sense of such a disorienting flow of people and places,
languages and landscapes. And in such a feverish and heightened place it would
seem to me that the landscape, the weather, street signs, sounds, music and
architecture would conspire in the most overblown and astonishing ways. When I
said goodbye to people it snowed suddenly in places it shouldn’t have snowed,
hunting signs suddenly materialised warning me of dangers I didn’t know
existed. I recorded a throbbing windmill branded at the top with a sign reading
‘climax’. I watched vultures while heart breaking songs in foreign languages
wafted from tinny petrol station PA systems, and even in the most isolated
places cars with creeping bass prowled my nights. And I found myself thinking
‘If this was a film, and it cut from me to these images with these sounds, it
would be so overblown and laboured no one could take it seriously’. I
couldn’t quite trust or believe in this maelstrom of experiences, of feelings,
but I could not escape them either. "